Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 135

A Great Vanishing Sea

Once the 4th largest lake on Earth, now shrunk to 10% of its original size. http://t.co/6tRK1LSe3k #AralSea pic.twitter.com/bCZyVhDMyK

— Climate Reality (@ClimateReality) October 6, 2014

New satellite images from NASA show that the Aral Sea, a once-vast lake on the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, has almost completely dried up. At first glance, the sea looks like another victim of climate change, but in fact its depletion originated in ill-considered Soviet agricultural policies:

Actually a freshwater lake, the Aral Sea once had a surface area of 26,000 square miles (67,300 square kilometers). It had long been been ringed with prosperous towns and supported a lucrative muskrat pelt industry and thriving fishery, providing 40,000 jobs and supplying the Soviet Union with a sixth of its fish catch. The Aral Sea was fed by two of Central Asia’s mightiest rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya.

But in the 1960s, Soviet engineers decided to make the vast steppes bloom. They built an enormous irrigation network, including 20,000 miles of canals, 45 dams, and more than 80 reservoirs, all to irrigate sprawling fields of cotton and wheat in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. But the system was leaky and inefficient, and the rivers drained to a trickle. In the decades that followed, the Aral Sea was reduced to a handful of small lakes, with a combined volume that was one-tenth the original lake’s size and that had much higher salinity, due to all the evaporation.

Anna Nemtsova explains how the events of the past decade finished it off:

The final chapter began in 2005, when the World Bank gave Kazakhstan the first $68 million credit to build a 13-kilometer-long dam to split the Aral Sea into halves: the Northern Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and the Southern Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. The dam prevented water from Kazakhstan’s Syr Darya from flowing into Uzbekistan’s half of the sea.

By 2008, Kazakhstan had managed to complete take control over the Syr Darya water, reviving 68 percent of the northern sea, reducing the salinity by half, and once again developing the fishing industry. On the southern, Uzbek side, however, the sea dried up that much faster. Uzbekistan, largely dependent on cotton, the industry of white gold, could not afford to re-channel water to its half. Also, with the water vanishing, the Russian oil company Lukoil found a silver lining in the disaster, setting out in 2006 to explore for oil and gas on the bottom of the Aral Sea in the Uzbek sector.

While climate change is not primarily responsible for the shrinking sea, it’s making the problem worse:

Recent studies suggest only 14% of the shrinking of the Aral Sea since the 1960s was caused by climate change, with irrigation by far the biggest culprit. Researchers looking at what will happen to Aral Sea levels with global warming over the next few decades have combined several model predictions together and expect net water loss to increase as more evaporation leads to less river inflow. However, if irrigation of the rivers continues, then net water loss will be even greater as river flow into the Aral Sea will essentially cease.

Faces Of The Day

Well this is just weird:

People pose for a photo in Suruc district of Sanliurfa as the smoke rises from Ayn al-Arab city (Kobani) of Syria after the US-led coalition bombed the targets of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Ayn al-Arab, on October 7, 2014. By Emin Menguarslan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

Europe’s Native Foreigners

Jennifer Fredette is troubled by the depiction of French Muslims:

It is true that we need to consider immigration when talking about the Muslim experience in France. That said, it is inaccurate to conflate “Muslims” with “immigrants.” Exact numbers are difficult to obtain because the French government refuses to collect or store statistics based on religion (or race or ethnicity). Nevertheless, we do know that many Muslims in France today are the children of immigrants, or even the grandchildren of immigrants; additionally, some have only one immigrant parent. And increasingly, French people are converting to Islam. Recognizing that immigration has directly or indirectly affected the lives of many Muslims in France is not the same as assuming (fallaciously) that all Muslims are foreigners.

But the real answer to our question about “permanent foreignness” does not lie in sloppy demography. French Muslims continue to appear foreign largely because today’s political debates are premised on an assumption of Muslim “different-ness,” and structured in a way that emphasizes this difference. For all of the discrimination, educational inequality, violence, and hostility that Muslims experience in France, political discourse concerning Muslims in the country overwhelmingly focuses on narrow religious issues it attributes to all Muslims: the hijab, the niqab, halal meat, the construction of mosques and the oppression of women.

She regrets how this creates “a flattened, homogenous view of Muslims in France” and “sidelines other political concerns that French Muslims have.” Meanwhile, Sara Wallace Goodman considers Muslim integration in the UK:

Muslim youth are born into British society and socialized in British schools, or naturalized after years of residence and integration, but endure frustrating barriers to socioeconomic mobility and face discrimination as members of an ethnic minority. And though a majority identify as British, a 2006 Pew survey shows how British Muslims maintain attitudes of disaffection and alienation more than Muslims in other European countries. Opportunistic imams can then mobilize a minority of impressionable youth toward a fundamental practice of religion. In fact, former Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells directly attributes the threat from British-born Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq to not dealing with their radicalization in the U.K.

Yet blame is ascribed not merely for the absence of tough responses to radicalization at home, but also in providing weak tropes of belonging in the first place. As David Cameron stated in a speech criticizing state multiculturalism, “We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.”

What Counts As A Cult?

Ross Douthat wrote a recent column noticing how “the cult phenomenon feels increasingly antique, like lava lamps and bell bottoms.” Drawing on the thinking of religious historian Philip Jenkins and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, Douthat argues that the decline of cults “might actually be a worrying sign for Western culture, an indicator not only of religious stagnation but of declining creativity writ large”:

The implications of Jenkins’s argument are specific to religion. Cults can be dangerous, even murderous, but they can also be mistreated and misjudged (as Koresh’s followers were, with fatal consequences); moreover, spiritual experiments led by the charismatic and the zealous are essential to religious creativity and fruitful change. From the Franciscans to the Jesuits, groups that looked cultlike to their critics have repeatedly revitalized the Catholic Church, and a similar story can be told about the role of charismatic visionaries in the American experience. (The enduring influence of one of the 19th century’s most despised and feared religious movements, for instance, is the reason the state of Utah now leads the United States on many social indicators.)

Thiel’s argument is broader: Not only religious vitality but the entirety of human innovation, he argues, depends on the belief that there are major secrets left to be uncovered, insights that existing institutions have failed to unlock (or perhaps forgotten), better ways of living that a small group might successfully embrace.

Suderman argues that Douthat probably “understates the ways in which semi-cult-like behavior has come to infuse daily life and mainstream culture”:

Yes, there are probably fewer cults in the aliens-and-messiahs sense, but there are more subcultures, in a wider variety, than ever before, more regimented lifestyle trends and minority beliefs about how to improve personal productivity or fitness, about how to become a better person and live a purer, more interesting, more connected and compelling life. Some of these subcultures remain distinctly fringe (dumpster-diving freegans, gently quirky bronies, furry fans, Juggalos [seen in the above video), while others are embraced, to varying degrees, by the mainstream:

At its height, Occupy Wall Street was as much an alternative lifestyle and belief community as a political movement. What is Crossfit if not a ritualized system that offers its highly dedicated, tightly-knit cells of followers a better and more meaningful existence?

None of these are cults in the specific sense that Douthat describes, with gated compounds and secret songs, but they are all experiments in behavior, taste, and belief intended to help adherents find meaning and connection in their lives.

In response, Douthat wonders if these subcultures really can take the place of religion:

I’m only slightly exaggerating when I say that this raises the most important question facing Western culture and society right now. Suderman is right, I think, that these “individualized and custom-tailored” forms of association are where creative/questing/artistic/religious impulses are increasingly being channeled, thanks to the internet and various broader economic and social forces; what’s more uncertain, to my mind, is whether they really encourage the kind of intense, enveloping commitment that I tend to think that deep creativity (among other goods) requires.

To the extent that like-minded people finding one another in ways that weren’t previously possible are creating cultural experiments that are as immersive, if not more so, than anything in the human past, then Suderman’s case for optimism makes a lot of sense. But to the extent that these experiments are more, well, dilettantish than past cultural groupings, more like hobbies than real commitments, more of a temporary identity that can be shaken off the moment it no longer completely pleases, they seem more likely to skim the shallows of creativity (to borrow an image from one of online culture’s more persuasive critics) than plumbing the true depths, more likely to cycle through pastiches and remixes (often fun and entertaining ones!) without stirring up something fully-realized and new.

(Image from the cover of Leander Kahney’s book Cult of Mac)

Correction Of The Day

“An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to when Mr. Macron’s wife had been his teacher. It was in high school, not first grade,” – NYT.

The View From Your Window

Houston, Minnesota, 12.38 pm

Codifying Consent

(NSFW):

Shikha Dalmia argues that the California consent law ignores the realities of sexual encounters:

The truth is that, except in the first flush of infatuation, both partners are rarely equally excited. At any given moment, one person wants sex more passionately than the other. What’s more, whether due to nurture or nature, there is usually a difference in tempo between men and women, with women generally requiring more “convincing.” And someone who requires convincing is not yet in a position to offer “affirmative” much less “enthusiastic” consent. That doesn’t mean that the final experience is unsatisfying — but it does mean that initially one has to be coaxed out of one’s comfort zone. Affirmative consent would criminalize that.

The reality is that much of sex is not consensual — but it is also not non-consensual. It resides in a gray area in between, where sexual experimentation and discovery happen. Sex is inherently dangerous. There will be misadventures when these experiments sometimes go wrong. Looking back, it can be hard to assign blame by ascertaining whether both partners genuinely consented. Indeed, trying to shoehorn sex into a strict, yes-and-no consent framework in an attempt to make it risk free can’t help but destroy it.

Jonathan Chait questions how much an affirmative consent law could accomplish:

It surely is possible to imagine that sex that comports with these new guidelines is sexy, or even more sexy than the kind most people have now. Yet one might find these ideas about reimagining sex attractive, as I do, while still having deep reservations about codifying them into law.

The fact that we need to change cultural attitudes about sex itself underscores the fact that cultural attitudes about sex lie well outside the contours established by the state of California. What percentage of the last decade worth of Hollywood sex scenes, if acted out between college students in California, would technically constitute rape? A majority? Ninety percent?

Deprogramming and reorienting societal ideas about sex is an evolutionary process. California isn’t merely attempting to set out to nudge the culture in this direction. It is reclassifying all sex that falls outside those still-novel ideas as rape. A law premised on this sort of sweeping, wholesale change is likely to fail.

Meanwhile, Danielle Citron argues that more laws are needed to deal with another area of sexual activity:

Why is it legal in many jurisdictions to disclose a person’s nude image in violation of that person’s expectation of privacy? A combination of factors is at work. One stems from the public’s ignorance about so-called revenge porn. As brave individuals have come forward to tell their stories, we are only now beginning to understand how prevalent and damaging revenge porn can be.

Another reason is that society has a poor track record addressing harms primarily suffered by women. It was an uphill battle to get domestic violence and workplace sexual harassment recognized as serious issues. Because revenge porn impacts women far more frequently than men and creates far more serious consequences for them, it is another harm that society is willing to minimize, trivialize, and tolerate. Although most people today would recoil at the suggestion that a woman’s consent to sleep with one man can be taken as consent to sleep with his friends, this is the very logic of revenge porn apologists.

The Best Of The Dish Today

I got an email from a friend today. The subject line read simply enough:

I’m married at home!

He explained:

The Virginia AG has announced that my marriage is now recognized in our home state. Well, that’s not his precise wording. But knowing this might happen did not prepare me for the joy I feel.

“Married at home”. How crazy that those two things could have been understood as separate for so long.

Our coverage of the momentous non-decision today began here, with bloggers puzzling what it all meant here, and the shoe really beginning to drop here. My reflections on the Court’s minimalism and the wisdom of avoiding a gay Roe vs Wade here. Ted Cruz has a cow here. The data now showing more than half of all Americans in states where marriage equality is the law is here. Plus: a piercing theological defense of the full inclusion of gays in the Catholic church – delivered last Friday in Rome.

And news you won’t find on Fox: how the Obama recovery beats the Reagan recovery in terms of private sector job growth.

The most popular post of the day was SCOTUS Clears The Way For Marriage Equality, followed by Obama Beats Reagan In Private Sector Job Growth.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here.

See you in the morning.

Seeing The Mountaintop

[Re-posted and updated from earlier today]

I’ve just been absorbing the news out of the Supreme Court this morning. Unless the composition of the court changes, it now seems close to certain that every American citizen will soon have a right to marry the person they love. An idea that once seemed preposterous now appears close to banal. The legal strategy that Evan Wolfson crafted from the early 1990s onward – a critical mass of states with marriage equality before a definitive Supreme Court ruling – has been vindicated and then some. The political and cultural strategy we pioneered at the same time – shifting public opinion slowly from the ground up, tapping into the deepest longings of gay people to become fully part of their own families and their own country for the first time, talking to so many heterosexual men and women about ourselves for the first time – also succeeded.

There have been many moments when individuals have tried to take credit for all this. No one should. The reason we persuaded so many in so short a time is that so many unknown private individuals – from Thanksgiving tables to church meetings to office cubicles to locker rooms – simply told the truth about who we really are. It took immense personal courage at times – and each moment someone came out, more light, more reality, seeped into the debate. The reason so many attempted the apparently impossible was because we had seen at close hand what no marriage rights meant: as spouses were kept from spouses even at the hour of death during the AIDS crisis and as our children were at risk of being taken away from us, as we grew our families.

These were elemental issues of human dignity – not abstract arguments about federal benefits or “natural law”. And this was a moral movement about the inherent dignity and equality of all of us – tapping into some of the profoundest truths from the founding of this country, and the deeper truths of our religious traditions, still sadly incapable, in many cases, of expanding, rather than constricting, the boundaries of human love. What we have right now in America is the moral majority for the dignity of every person’s capacity to love and be loved. What we have right now is the defeat of fear and fundamentalism – the two most dangerous sirens of our time.

What I also love about this conservative but extraordinary decision from SCOTUS is that it affirms the power of federalism against the alternatives. Marriage equality will not have been prematurely foisted on the country by one single decision; it will have emerged and taken root because it slowly gained democratic legitimacy, from state to state, because the legal and constitutional arguments slowly won in the court of public opinion, and because an experiment in one state, Massachusetts, and then others, helped persuade the sincere skeptics that the consequences were, in fact, the strengthening of families, not their weakening.

Those who wished to circumvent this process, to grab the credit, to condemn all those in dissent as ipso facto bigots, have mercifully been sidelined by the court. And now in thirty states (maybe thirty-five), the reality of this social reform will be seen: the quotidian responsibilities of spouses and parents, the moments of joy and agony that are part of all marriages, the healing of wounds of separation and ostracism. It won’t happen at once, but it will slowly emerge, through a greater collective empathy and inclusion. Every time a father holds back tears as his daughter marries her beloved, every time a child feels secure with her two dads or two moms, every time a young gay kid asks himself if he is really worthy because he is gay and now knows he can one day have a relationship like his mom and dad and feels less tormented and less alone: these are the ways we humans can grow and become what we fully can be. This is an expansion not just of human freedom, but of human love.

It is so easy today to see horror all around, anger surging, hysteria rising, fear spreading. But we see also in this remarkable, unlikely transformation the possibility of something much different: that human beings can put aside fear and embrace empathy, can abandon prejudice in favor of reality, can also see in themselves something they never saw before: an enlargement of the circle of human dignity.

I think of all those who never saw this day, the countless people who lived lives of terror and self-loathing for so, so long, crippled by the deep psychic wound of being told that the very source of your happiness – the love for someone else – was somehow evil, or criminal, or unmentionable. I think of the fathomless oceans of pain we swam through, with no sight of dry land, for so long. I think of the courage of so many who, in far, far darker times than these, summoned up the courage to live with integrity, even at the risk of their lives. And I cherish America, a place where this debate properly began, a place where the opposition was relentless and impassioned, a country which allowed a truly democratic debate over decades to change minds and hearts, where the Supreme Court guided, but never pre-empted, the kind of change that is all the more durable for having taken its time.

Know hope.

(Photo: Supporters of same-sex marriage gather in front of the US Supreme Court on March 26, 2013 in Washington, DC. Same-sex marriage takes center stage at the US Supreme Court on Tuesday as the justices begin hearing oral arguments on the emotionally-charged issue that has split the nation. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.)

Quote For The Day

A reader passed it along:

This Facebook post is from a CT Supreme Court justice. When he was a state senator, he was the main proponent and author (I think) of Connecticut’s marriage equality law (which was ultimately never passed – a court decision beat the legislature to the punch). He posted it around 8 pm eastern time tonight.